+ What is modernism?
The term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.

+ What is it called in different countries?
  • Modernism In the United States
  • Futurism in Italy
  • Constructivism in Russia

+ When did it start and why?
The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term avant-garde, with which the movement was labeled until the word "modernism" prevailed, was used for the arts.
The development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism.


+ What are its main characteristics?
  • Open Form
  • Free verse
  • Discontinuous narrative
  • Juxtaposition
  • Intertextuality
  • Classical allusions
  • Borrowings from other cultures and languages
  • Unconventional use of metaphor
  • Metanarrative
  • Fragmentation
  • Multiple narrative points of view (parallax)
  • Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
  • Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
  • Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future
  • Disillusionment
  • Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology
  • Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes
  • Stream of consciousness
  • Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th Century